My chemistry teacher says a lot of ridiculous things. So much such that we gave him his own twitter page, which my class inherited from the year before us. http://twitter.com/VanDerWaalrusSome of my favorites:I like to think of a block of cheese. Imagine a cheese block that..actually this is a terrible example. Forget I said anything kids.Lewis dot structures should be shooting out of your fingers like projectile vomit by now.I want to create a suspension of Lego's and...whiskey.

I have a lot from my chemistry class. These are the only ones I can remember off the top of my head:"During Beta emission, a neutron decays and leaves behind a proton and an electron. That electron doesn't like to be in the nucleus and flies out as fast as possible, like this..." She then proceeded to run around the room, screaming, and eventually ran into the hall and didn't come back for 20 min.Kid: What does NRG stand for?Teacher: Say it again.Kid: NRG.Teacher: Say it again.Kid: NRG.Teacher: Say it again.Kid: NR... Wait, I get it.Every year she also shows a diagram of a boat full of people and ions, called the ion boat. If you know your ions, you're on the ion boat. If you don't know your ions, you could get eaten by the frequency shark (the symbol for frequency looks like a shark's fin, for those of you who don't know). If you really know your ions, you can surf by, like the wave length surfer (the symbol for wavelength is an upside down y and someone drew it into a stick figure once, it's also a pun).

mathgeek17 wrote:(the symbol for frequency looks like a shark's fin, for those of you who don't know)

This isn't really to do with the quote, but I don't get using nu for frequency. I've always been taught with f which seems far more natural in every way. Of course, you can't get eaten by an f-shark, it looks too ridiculous.

mathgeek17 wrote:(the symbol for frequency looks like a shark's fin, for those of you who don't know)

This isn't really to do with the quote, but I don't get using nu for frequency. I've always been taught with f which seems far more natural in every way. Of course, you can't get eaten by an f-shark, it looks too ridiculous.

For some reason, me, my friend, and a couple of our teachers were discussing Peruvian runners. My friend said they were the best in the world; something to do with lung capacity. I retaliated with: "Then how come they've never won the Olympics?" (bad argument, I know, but it was all I could come up with.) my English teacher then replied: "cause peruvians can only run on hilly surfaces. You enter a Peruvian in the Olympics, he runs about five feet before throwing himself at the ground and sobbing"

My Chemistry teacher's former students have compiled lists of his quotes. Apparently they're legendary. I only have one memorable one from this year, though. He was talking about particle accelerators and briefly went over the one in Fermilab. His closing comment was, "They recently shut down the Tevatron... ehh, apparently America can't afford science anymore."

A friend of mine's English teacher maintains that every weekend, the entirety of the English department and the Maths department go in a maths teacher's transit van to the local beach and engage in naked mud wrestling on the sand. He's quite strange.

“It is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.” -Terry Pratchett

On a sentimentalist view, I know that torture is wrong like I know that marmite is disgusting. Do you all know what marmite is? It's this horrid British yeast paste — my mother is British — that they invented during the war when they ran out of food and had to start scraping things out of drain pipes. And since then they continue to damage their palates and eat the stuff. Australians have their own version, Vegemite, which is slightly less offensive because it has bits of kangaroo in it. Anyway, if you're ever in Britain you should go and get some of it... well, only you shouldn't. It is not an acquirable taste.

"Saying 'It was Valentine's Day!' is not an excuse for not getting the assignment done. I don't love anyone. .... Except my wife."

"No, you can't sit down. You just have to stand right here for the rest of the class."

"That is a creepy horse. That's why I never let my kids ride on it. *switches to another image that is the same image only with a different depth of field* Nice horse. *switches back* scare-your-kids horse *switches back* nice horse *switches back* scares your kids." (This was about a merry-go-round horse.)

All by my Photography professor. He's snarky, sarcastic, and generally awesome. My only complaint is that he talks too loud. I usually end up with a headache within half an hour after the class because he talks so loudly.

"We have this thing called a waist ... and it bends!" (These first three were all concerning people yanking the computer toward them to check out what's wrong and thus unplugging stuff or ruining things rather than just leaving it in it's spot and bending over and looking at it.)

Chem prof, at the end of a late night lecture last night."Happy Valentine's day. Go watch a porno or something."

Engineering substitute lecturer:"And MATLAB isn't the only place where misspellings will ruin your life. I was on a city's construction project approval committee, and one proposition came to us with a real doozy. It was the word "public" minus a very important letter. And it was everywhere. I mean, once is understandable, twice is... eh..., but three time is Freudian."

CorruptUser wrote:Religions are like genitalia. It's OK to have them, but don't whip them out in public, don't argue about whose is better, and keep them away from my kids.

Statistics professor: Have you seen the Bernoulli distribution in your probability course? The answer is either yes or no.You kind of either get the joke or you don't.

Actually, I still don't know whether it was a joke or not, but I thought it was funny. (If it quote didn't mean anything to you, the Bernoulli distribution is the "yes or no" distribution with one of only two values, 0 or 1.)

Thought I'd share a few quotes from lecturers. Most of them are from the same awesome physics professor. I have translated these from Finnish.

"Nothing is as cunning as an engineer, except for beavers."

"An engineer has a habit of getting to the right answer one way or another, provided that he knows the answer in advance."

"The first rule of optics: light travels from left to right."

"If a force is constant, there's nothing fun about it."

"There are two schools of thought: one wants to just wave their hands and make interpretations from those signs, others just want to get these calculations done. Regrettably I belong to the group that just wants to calculate." (about a sign error)

"A quark is the kind of creature that can not move. It is fixed, it has been put to jail. It has been naughty some time!"

"There are also irreversible thermodynamical reactions. The finest of which is life. It's pretty difficult to go backwards. The system is in equilibrium for a while and then it collapses."

"When two cars from the same manufacturer collide, it's not a collision, it's a scattering. When they are from different manufacturers, that's a real collision!" (about Coulomb repulsion)

"Someone shoot the chemists!" (a comment about 1/cm used as a unit for energy)

"Everyone knows what Pauli spin matrices are, except I and you."

"A topologist is a sort of person that, when you give him an object made of rubber with a pattern drawn on it, starts wringing it joyfully."

"Who on Earth would calculate that? Nobody!" (about a 3x3 matrix)

"How in the name of the devil does the electron know it's being measured? It just knows."

"If some random person comes to sell you 7 vectors in a bag, how do you know they are linearly independent?"

"Details are open, this is a developing science and even what we know is partially just guessing." (a way to end the last lecture of Introduction to Nuclear Physics)